I tell people that I have been a photographer all of my life. And its true – mostly. My father was a photographer. He specialized in photographing Native Americans. I attended many an Indian Pow Wow as a kid. For a while I thought I had a bunch of distant relatives that dressed up a lot. My dad also invariably shot lots of pictures of me and my siblings when we were young. I literally grew up around cameras, darkroom equipment, slides and prints. One of the early pictures of me as a child is walking down a country path with a camera in my hand. A real camera.
There were long periods when I didn’t shoot photos. A lot of my childhood was spent playing baseball or riding my bike, or just hanging around with my friends. I was in a couple of bands – some good and some not so good. I learned to drive, discovered girls (not necessarily in that order) and generally did normal kid in America stuff. I read a lot as a child.
But I also shot pictures. I used to help my dad in the darkroom. Some of my earliest memories are of helping him agitate film or make black and white prints. When I went to college I took a photography class figuring it would be an easy A. It wasn’t. I took some photos of friends and places. I even did some photography for the college newspaper.
It wasn’t until I joined the working world that I got serious about photography. I had always enjoyed it, but I didn’t focus – sorry, couldn’t resist – on the craft or art of it until I was responsible for bringing back usable results. Shooting for a newspaper is a great way to learn if photography is for you or not. I shot around 20 rolls of 36 frame Kodak Tri-X every week. Sharing darkroom duty, I would often process upwards of 50 rolls over a weekend. I learned to see what was going on, quickly figure out how to capture an image that told the story, shoot the photo in five frames or less, get the names of the folks in the frame, and move on to my next assignment. It was hectic, frustrating, exhilarating and fun.
Being a newspaper photographer also got me into places I would normally never go or be let into. Society parties, high-end fund raising events, celebrity bashes, and more. Did I mention that I was doing this in the Hamptons, during summer. Very heady stuff indeed.
Most people were happy to see me. I once shot a party at the beach house of Susan Lucci – the soap opera star. She was delighted to have me in her home and took me around introducing me to all manner of celebrities, news people, movie producers and several of the Village People. It was fun and after I took the photo I was there to shoot, she told me I could stay and enjoy the fireworks – it was on the Fourth of July. I did and had a great time.
On other occasions I got to shoot and talk with Roy Lichtenstein, Alan Alda, Tom Brokaw, etc. One really fun assignment was shooting Christy Brinkley during the rehearsal for a fashion show at a disco – thats how long ago all of this was. She was delightful and stunningly gorgeous even in work jeans and a paint shirt.
Other people may not have been so keen to have me around such as the miscreants who got caught doing bad and had to be “perp walked” by the local constabulary. There were those occasions where people misbehaved or were socially inappropriate such as at Town Council Meetings and political events. And I cannot count the number of times that people told me that they were going to break my camera. It never happened. Not once.
Shooting for the newspaper taught me to see the scene before me the way a camera sees it, not our eyes. The camera is very literal whereas our eyes are very subjective. I was doing this in the days when all cameras were manual. There was no auto focus and if the camera had a photo meter built in, it simply suggested what the appropriate settings should be and let you way under or over expose the shot if you were not paying attention. I eventually did get a professional camera that had shutter and aperture automation, but by then I was so used to setting my own controls that I continued on in manual mode. In fact, that is my preference today even though I own cameras today that do everything but put makeup on the subjects.
Speaking of equipment – and what photographer doesn’t – my father preferred a dual lens reflex. He had several Roliflexes, Mamiaflex, and other DLRs. That was the kind of camera that you held at waist lever and looked down into. It had two lenses on the front, one for framing and focusing on your subject and the other for actually taking the pictures. They were sturdy, dependable and really heavy. When I went to college, I was handed a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) and there was no turning back for me. It was light, quick, easy to use. It was the sports car of cameras. When I brought one home to show dad, he pooh poohed it and told me that they were unreliable and made you (me) lazy. Well, I’m still lazy to this day. By the way, range finder cameras are also technically DLRs but that didn’t seem to bother my dad so much. He had one of those. A Leica of course.
I flirted with medium format SLRs for a while and still have a Bronica to this day. But they too were heavy, large, somewhat clumsy and took large rolls of film. They take gorgeous photos though. I also toyed with large format cameras – still own a 4×5 Crown Graphic with a cool German lens. But the SLR was always my tool of choice. I mention this only because I love to talk about gear. Right now I own upwards of 40 cameras, most of which are antiques that probably no longer work. But they are cool to look at.
For the past 40 or so years I have shot pictures pretty steadily. I dabble in video now and then, but my first love is still photography. Last year my wife bought me the best present I have ever received – a weekend photo workshop put on my National Geographic and taught by a NatGeo photographer. Way cool! Like music, no matter how long you have practiced or plied your trade, there is always something more to learn. There are always ways to polish your skills. It is a hobby, a craft, a way of life that is both demanding and fulfilling.
Anway, I need to wrap this up. There are lots of reasons to love photography. I love it because I enjoy capturing a pleasant looking image, catching the essence of a person in a portrait and not the image they normally project to the world, and because it reminds me of my dad. Some how it keeps us close.